ne in a series of books focused on Brazilian visual culture, Maria
Cristina
da
Silva Martins's Humor
&
Eroticism in Advertising emerges as a pathbreaking exercise in cultural studies, delving into
the aesthetic and political dimensions of
Brazilian print
advertisements
and how these function to activate desire and
maintain cycles of
consumption
in late-capitalist society. The
interpenetration of visual
and
verbal languages form a
seamless
web of signs whose driving forces, humor and the
erotic, have been
effectively
harnessed in order to maintain the status quo in
post-industrial mass
societies.

It
is no longer a question of discovering, via
Jakobson, that the poetic
function
is what activates the language of advertising, as
in the famous
paronomasia
"I like Ike," where the sound form reinforces the
propagandistic
content
of the expression. It is now a matter of
postulating a perceptual shock
provoked by the intrusion, during the creation of
the advertisement, of
certain cultural series in a state of emergency or
risk... Using as her
point of departure advertisements published in
Brazilian magazines in
the
eighties, [Cristina Martins] shows how the
humor/eroticism relation,
inserted
in the connections between the verbal and the
visual, unleashes, in a
non-simplistic
and unusual manner, political and aesthetic
implications between the
advertisement
and its cultural context.

Gerald Janecek's classic
title is the
most
comprehensive treatment of a significant episode of
the historical
avant-garde
period to which many refer but with little concrete
background. According
to
Charlotte Douglas (Russian and Slavic Studies, NYU),
Zaum "is an
encyclopedic
account of zaum or 'beyonsense,' the most
distinctive feature of
Russian
avant-garde art and poetry early in the 20th
century. Janecek has mined
a myriad of arcane and inaccessible sources,
gathered the entire
historical
record in one place, and made it readable and
comprehensible. His
account
of zaum theory and practice will be indispensable
for anyone interested
in modern poetry and art. Certainly it will become a
standard text for
all students of Russian Futurism."

Gerald
J. Janecek is Professor of Russian at the University of
Kentucky. He received his Ph.D. in Slavic Languages and
Literatures from the University of Michigan in 1972. He
specializes in 20th century avant-garde Russian
literature of the early decades and in contemporary
Russian poetry. He has written on Andrei Bely, on
Russian Futurism and on a variety of contemporary
Russian poets. His publications include translations of
Bely's Kotik Letaev (2nd ed. Northwestern, 1999) and The
First Encounter (Princeton, 1979), and the books The
Look of Russian Literature (Princeton, 1984) and Sight & Sound
Entwined: Studies of the New Russian Poetry (Berghahn,
2000).

This
collection
of irreverent, bold, and challenging cutting-edge
essays explores the
recent
cultural phenomenon of "avant-pop."
Originally "published" on
the Alt.X
World Wide Web publishing site in the spring
of 1995, this
collection
now appears as a physical book you can hold in
your hand, throw at the
wall or immortalize in your private altars. Essays
by Brooks Landon,
Michael
Joyce, Eurudyce, Curtis White, David Blair, Larry
McCaffery, Ronald
Sukenick,
Takayuki Tatsumi, Martin Schecter, Mark Amerika,
Lance Olsen, Steven
Shaviro,
Harry Polkinhorn, Raymond Federman, and Don Webb.

From
the
editors'
"Introduction"

Representations of FashionThe Metropolis
& Mediological Reflection between the Nineteenth
and the Twentieth Centuries

The
rest of us interpreters of culture might as well lay
pens to rest.
Antonio Rafele's rapid injection in the arm spirals
us down through
rabbit holes where we glimpse with penetrating
insight projections of
our urban-made psychic selves. As if lucid dreaming,
we come to
understand how authors such as Poe, Leopardi, and
García Márquez offer
pit-stops in our otherwise impossibly fast-forward
moving,
Ritalin-induced life filled to the brim with TV,
internet, and
videogames. We can reach through this illusion, but
choose instead to
buy into the discontinuities of fashion that never
quite satiate our
existential emptiness. Not since Baudrillard,
Barthes, McLuhan, and the
Wachowski Bros has such a mind come along who can
zip open reality to
show with such precision the specular and
spectacular nature of our
existence... Dare if you will to step into this
daydream.

FREDERICK LUIS ALDAMAArts & Humanities
Distinguished Professor at The Ohio State University

In
this provocative and pathbreaking book, Rafele shows
us how a
mediological approach can radically and productively
reframe our
understanding of modernist subjectivity. His lyrical
meditations on the
works of Simmel and Benjamin reveal the extent to
which 20th century
notions of subjectivity must be understood in
relation to 19nth-century
concepts of the metropolis and the technology of
photography. If you've
ever wondered what the 'New' in New Media Studies
might actually look
like, you'll find a compelling example in this
brilliantly-conceived
and well-executed study.

RYAN SCHNEIDERAssociate
Professor & Director of Graduate Studies,
Department of English and
Affiliated Faculty, Program in American Studies,
Purdue University

Based
on The
Trial
by Franz Kafka, this work contains the play script
written by
Héctor Ortega as well as documentation of the
original performance,
previously
unpublished artworks by scenographer José Luis
Cuevas, a
prologue
by Augusto Monterroso, critical essays on the
subject of humor in Kafka
by Héctor Ortega, Hugo Hiriart, Manuel Flores, and
D. Emily
Hicks,
and a general introduction by Harry Polkinhorn.
Designed for the
general reader interested in theatre, Latin
American Arts in general,
Border Performance Theory and more.

Philadelpho
Menezes's Poetics & Visuality offers an account
of the development of extreme poetic practices in a
country known for its commitment to experimentation.
This richly illustrated history begins with
spatialism, to which concretism comes as a
corrective ordering in the early 1950s. The "visual
poetry" of the last decades is cogently theorized as
intersign poetry (collage, package, montage
poetries), a movement that has drawn international
attention.

wikiBIO: Philadelpho Menezes
(born in 1960 in São Paulo, Brazil, dead in 2000,
Brazil, in a car accident). Brazilian poet, visual
poet, pioneer of new media poetry, professor in
the Communication and Semiology post-graduation
program at the Pontifical University of São Paulo.
He performed research for his post-graduate degree
at the University of Bologna, in Italy (1990).
With Brazilian artist Wilton Azevedo Philadepho
Menezes created a pioneer intermedia-poetry
CD-ROM: "InterPoesia. Poesia Hipermidia
Interativa" (1998). In Italy he collaborated with
the first net-poetry project: Karenina.it, by
Italian artist Caterina Davinio.

The
Tyranny
of Data traces the manifold links between
institutional and
scholarly
practices in the exciting field of contemporary
geography. In 1995
Professor
Getis was honored by SDSU's Graduate Division and
Research as the
University's
tenth University Research Lecturer. The lecture he
delivered was
entitled
"The Tyranny of Data" and is reproduced here,
along with Getis's
"Scholarship,
Leadership, and Quantitative Methods," which
touches on many related
subjects.

Arthur
Getis is a Professor Emeritus of Geography at San Diego State
University. He received his Ph.D. in Geography from the
University of Washington in 1961. He has Master and Bachelor
degrees from the Pennsylvania State University. Within GIScience,
Getis’ specialties include spatial statistics, pattern analysis, urban
geography, and disease and crime clustering.

Getis’ record of
sustained contributions over the past forty years distinguishes him
among scholars in GIScience. Getis has authored more than one
hundred refereed journal articles and book chapters about various
aspects of GIScience. Several of the publications, such as his
work on local statistics (with J.K. Ord), have been cited hundreds of
times – with “Analysis of spatial association by use of distance
statistics” showing over seven hundred citations in Google
Scholar! Getis has also authored or edited eleven books - most
notably Models of spatial processes: an approach to the study of point,
line, and area patterns (Getis and Boots, 1978), Point pattern analysis
(Boots & Getis, 1987), and Spatial econometrics and spatial
statistics (Getis et al., 2004).

Throughout his career,
Getis’ interests in urban and population geography led him to develop
tools to solve important problems in analyzing spatial patterns.
In turn, the use of those tools and models have helped others
understand how spatial analysis can enhance work in their own field of
research. As a result, Getis has been a great evangelist for
geographic applications in other disciplines such as economics,
criminology, public health, regional science, and
demography. His work has taken him to lecture and teach at
prestigious universities around the world – many without formal
geography departments – about the importance of geographical
analysis. As a result, he has broken many research barriers and
helped enhance the respect for GIScience as a discipline. (source)

Two-Way
Street
presents Sao Paulo's Paulista Avenue from "the
other side of the
street."
Bogéa offers a semiotic and genealogical analysis
of the
richly
varied architectural styles of this major world
avenue. Urban space is
seen as a coded form of communications network,
whose fuller message
emerges
upon critical examination.

This
volume of
original essays by an international group of
scholars investigates
verbal-visual
relations, broadly conceived, in the modern
period. The book explores,
through a wide varity of theoretical and critical
approaches, how
thinkers
in various fields--aesthetics, poetry, visual art,
philosophy, and book
illustration--have approached the problematic
relationship between the
verbal and the visual. Conjunctions honors
the work
of a
pioneering
scholar in the field of interarts studies, Renée
Riese
Hubert.
Contributors
include Michel Deguy, Judd D. Hubert, Claude
Gandelman, Laurie Edson,
Marjorie
Perloff, Roger Shattuck, Georges Roque, Sydney
Lévy,
Anne-Marie
Christin, Richard Vernier, Breon Mitchell, Steven
Winspur, Roger
Cardinal,
Robert W. Greene, Eric T. Haskell, Harriett Watts,
Willard Bohn, and
Virginia
A. La Charité. The book includes a biography and
list of
publications
of Renée Riese Hubert.

Long
regarded
among the principal American critics and theorists
of the avant-garde
in
literature and the arts, Kostelanetz presents a
contemporary guide to
reading
vanguard literature. Recalling the purpose of Ezra
Pound, Kostelanetz
guides
the reader to an "acceptance and understanding of
radically new art."